FWIW, I too gave this a little more thought, and from an engineering prespective, found that my proposed solution would tightly couple UI with business logic if

FWIW, I too gave this a little more thought, and from an engineering prespective, found that my proposed solution would tightly couple UI with business logic if greater care isn't taken. I am sure it isn't much overhead in simple news.arc to selectively render UI elements based on the status of a post, for example, but in larger applications, feature-requests could lead to a lot of conditionals creeping into display rendering. What we need is to study and consolidate "Adaptive User-Interfaces" (a well stablished field of study, btw) with software engineering, and specially the web (and even more specially, with respect to dynamic programming languages and in my case Lisp and CLOS.) Something I have been doing lately was reverse-engineering a few google apps from their rendered HTML and minified JS. I don't wanna throw speculations around, but I think Google has some sort of a "learning" engine which adjusts the shown content to the estimated level of user expertise. They do this with a "newbie cookie". See the sources for any google apps help pages, for example, and you will see this: var global_newbie_cookie = "newbie_11"; Here is one: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 Your global newbie cookie should be different than mine. Regards.